Action on the rails
Commuter film festival pushes the boundaries, not your budget
You probably don’ t need me to tell you that the Toronto International Film Festival began this Thursday, with something like 300 features poised to descend upon the city for two weeks in a maelstrom of movie mania. That’s the only film news anybody seems to talk about here for a month. But did you know that another deluge of cinema, totally unrelated to TIFF, is set to arrive next week too, at exactly the same time? It’s the Toronto Urban Film Festival, or TUFF. It started Thursday and runs until the 18th, just like TIFF. This is counter-programming of the most defiant kind.
Of course TIFF tends to be so totalizing that there are hardly any conventional places left in the city to host a competing film festival, given that TIFF itself makes use not only of every repertory theatre in town but every makeshift auditorium it can find, including ones in art galleries and college campuses. But this isn’t an ordinary sort of film festival. TUFF is what its founder, Sharon Switzer, calls a “public commuter festival,” which, she explains, “is a film festival that takes place entirely in public transit” — on the city’s subways, in other words, on those 20-inch television screens so ubiquitous in and around the TTC. You don’t have to buy a $50 ticket, get dressed up or navigate the furor of the red carpet to enjoy a world premiere at TUFF. You just to have to commute.
“The idea of the festival for us was to give commuters something interesting to look at,” Switzer says. “And to give filmmakers this unprecedented audience of a million people every day — a million people who wouldn’t normally bother to see their work at a festival.” Switzer’s vast slate of original programming — a battery of 60-second silent shorts, handpicked by Switzer from across the globe and divided into sub-programmes with names like “Outta My Way”! (“shorts that highlight tenacity and perseverance”) and “Waking Nightmare” (“dark visions of lost souls and raccoons defeating evil”) — is proffered to work-bound Torontonians without them even realizing it. Which in the very least is a kind of reprieve: ordinarily those screens just show commercials. “We’re giving people a short break from advertising,” Switzer says.
Certainly it’s more difficult, Switzer admits, to grab the attention of the press when everything is all-TIFF all the time; there aren’t many column inches remaining after the celebrity profiles and premiere reviews have been exhaustively penned. But for Switzer those kinds of drawbacks aren’t important. “It’s this amazing thing. Sixty- odd subway stations bringing film to people every day when they most want it. In terms of doing something good for the city, this is the right time to do it.”